It’s vacation week! We look forward each year to what has become our annual trip to the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. We were fortunate this year to have beautiful warm and sunny weather which allowed us to have several days of outdoor adventures. Yet again this year we explored the Smoky Mountain National Park for several hours of walking around and exploring Cade’s Cove. It’s fun to go each year and see how much bigger Griffin is and the different things he likes to see and do.  

After all of that hiking around we headed to The Island and enjoyed a delicious dinner at Paula Deen’s Restaurant. Yummers. It is served family style and we indulged in all kinds of tastiness as you can see in our photo. After dinner we walked around the Island and played some games. Kevin and I were both stunned when Griffin, on his second try, won a stuffed animal from the “claw” arcade game. Wow, he was so excited and I was surprised as I had just watched several adults with numerous failed attempts! https://youtu.be/ZE7YRC_KTzM

Griffin enjoyed some bears in the snow pancakes from the Pancake Pantry one morning 🙂 Then we explored the Village area shops for a short bit and then later headed to Dollywood. The weather was so warm! We were in short sleeves and were toasty walking around but once the sun went down the temps dropped too. We had a great time and Finn got to sit and talk with Santa. He asked for a real baseball bat, a real baseball, and a real baseball glove.  (No more of this soft stuff!). He also saw Clarice, Yukon, and Abominable again this year. He also played a “baseball” throwing game where if you get all 3 balls into Abominable’s mouth you win a stuffed Abominable toy.  Sure enough, he got three in a row on his first try! We were happy for him and he was so excited. He was tall enough this year to ride several of the rides this year so we saw several smiles of him enjoying new things. He and Kevin even rode on a crazy spinner ride that he thought was great! Another new adventure for us this year was heading to Ripley’s Aquarium in Gatlinburg. It is really a nice place and we spent a few hours walking around checking out the different animals. They even had a couple of animals you could touch so Finn got to feel what a jellyfish and a horseshoe crab feel like! Another really neat area was the penguins. There are tunnels that kids can crawl through that go right through the swim tanks and then they can pop up and stand amongst the penguins! He loved going in and out several times.  A new restaurant we hit up this year for breakfast was Crockett’s Breakfast Camp.  Oh my, it was delish! I had their signature pancakes that are cooked in a cast iron skillet and they are literally 2 inches tall, each! Griffin helped me polish off the strawberries and whipped cream that accompanied my griddle cakes 🙂 We moved cabins this year in the middle of our stay as we were there long enough that neither cabin had the full length of our stay.  The second cabin we went to, “Lover’s Lookout,” we stayed for only single night before being moved at our request due to gross amount of cockroaches that we discovered after returning to the cabin on what would have been the second evening. Gross! Fortunately, we were able to move to “Treehouse” which was a great cabin and we enjoyed the rest of our stay there :).  And here are some videos from our time in Tennessee, including Griffin’s first flip! He was so excited that when we went back to The Island the next day he wanted to do it again.

I took a screen shot of the weather (after we’d been there several days) so we can recall next year how lovely it was 🙂

And we celebrated anniversary #4 while on our trip this year. We spent the evening at the Dixie Stampede and then moving from a yucky cabin to a clean one.  It was memorable!